Understanding from Samuel: Part 2 of "Translation Overload"

Dear friends, what follows is the second of what will likely be a four part sneak preview of a memoire I think I'll "Translation Overload."  Click here to see Part 1, "Translating for Daniel," and if you'd like to see another facet of this time in Venezuela and the memories that accompanied that time, click here to begin another four part series.

Beauty and terror.  No middle ground.  Mother Nature kept changing her mind.  Throughout our time in Venezuela, bursts of thunder, lightning, and heavy downpours of rain raged between moments of gentle warmth with blue skies and a brightly shining sun. 

I love thunderstorms.  Electrons are popping off in a charged atmosphere, hence the lightning, and I feel the electricity surging through my own body.  None of us North Americans had thought to bring an umbrella for a mission trip in May, but our Venezuelan hosts were too kind to us -- too kind, that is, for me.  A few of our hosts sacrificed their own umbrella for us us, gratefully accepted by my other visiting teammates.  Please, may no one offer one to me.   I wanted to walk through the streets drenched like Daniel and the young men.  But head elder Samuel, the one who had served the black beans that ushered in my waterfall of memories, graciously offered his to me.  With his round face and big, warm smile and eyes that dance, Samuel carried a lovely childlike warmth about him.  As a grandfather to a four year old, the age my son had just turned, he felt like a father to me and acted as one with the offer of his umbrella.  How could I refuse?  I compromised: “solomente si contigo.”   Only if I join you.  He smiled and held the umbrella for us both.  If I had to be covered from the glorious energy of a thunderstorm, at least I did so with my father figure Samuel.

 At night, I was battling a life-long familiarity: insomnia.  I had mistakenly left my Prozac, prescribed for my Post-partum Depression and to help me to sleep, at home.  But this time, the sleepless nights were elaborating on the waterfall of memories, which came to life more vividly at night.   I was shown my toddlerhood in São Paulo, Brazil as a place of warmth where I had felt loved and at home.  There, my family was living a life without wealth, but a slow and peaceful one, quite different from our later rich and fast-paced life in Silicon Valley.  An epiphany was dawning.  Was this why I had felt so lonely and overwhelmed in San Jose, wasn’t fitting in, and had to take summer school to avoid repeating first grade?  Could I have been in culture shock?

 Although the memories brought me healing at night, the day time called for much strength.  My legs were so unsteady one Saturday morning while trying to walk into our hotel’s breakfast room that I almost fell, but, thankfully, my hotel roommate caught me.  Don, our main leader, witnessed my near fall, pointed to me, then up toward our hotel rooms, and said, “Rest.”  “They’ll be without a translator,” I said.  “I’ll call Daniel and let him know you need to rest.  He’ll understand.”  True.  He would.

             While resting in my hotel room, another thunderstorm erupted.  I opened the shade to watch the downpour, see the lightning streak across the sky, and listen to the bomb-like blasts and drum rolls of the thunder.  I had been ordered to rest, but wasn’t sleeping.  This was my chance.  Free of the umbrella, I left my hotel room and went outside to the storm.  The thunder was loud and the lightning was bright, but the rain was gentle and the air was warm.  As I walked away from the high-rise hotels and into a residential zone, I was getting wet, but not drenched, and the warm air tingled on my wet face.  Living in the Pacific Northwest, where rain usually comes with cold air, this warmth on my wet skin felt invigorating.  The exhaustion of lost sleep was gone, and strength was built into my legs.  I almost felt like I could defy gravity and levitate through the electric air. 

When I came to a fairly open field on the other side of the street, I watched the lightning show of bright lights streaking from one end of the sky to the other. Then my eyes took on an unknown sight.  I could see beyond the lightening and into the heavens.  Waves of purple, blue, lilac, and magenta, spotted with little bubbles of yellow and green, spun together into a stunning and artistic spiral. An aurora borealis?  I had never seen an aurora before, and I knew this wasn’t the time and place for one, but the photographs I had seen by those who had captured these magnificent heavenly events were the only comparison I could make to what I was seeing in the skies, but this aurora, behind and beyond the lightning, seemed like a stage set backdrop for the performers of the dancing lightning streaks.  No, not an aurora, I thought.  Heaven.  And I marveled.  Who is this Choreographer? 

Yes, Heaven.  Another of those mysterious whispers had just arrived.  But you think heaven is the afterlife.  No, heaven is here.  With you.  Now.  This was the same soft voice that had whispered that I was to be the fourth translator.  It had been right; no one else had stepped up to the plate, and, I smiled to myself, I was the right one to be Daniel’s translator.  Could I trust this whisper too? 

            The thunder, the lightning, the aurora vision, these new whispers, telepathy with Daniel, and the waterfall of memories kept building, to my amazement, and ushered in a three and a half month period that I would later call my “Summer in the Twilight Zone.” 

            The day following the aurora vision was a Sunday, Mother’s Day, celebrated as such in both the United States and in Venezuela.  Daniel’s church put on a grand Mother’s Day celebration, led primarily by the youth.  As the mother of two very young children, one who had just turned four and the other a year and a half, I was torn between missing them and feeling relieved to be liberated from their needs.  My husband and I had both felt this trip would help treat my Post-partum Depression better than any drug, and that impression was proving itself to be true. 

The celebration began with a drama presentation of mime to a song playing in the background.  The scene began to our right with a boy about twelve lying on his bed, tossing and turning, unable to sleep.  Like me, he was suffering insomnia.  Then a woman entered from our left, with a slow backward jazz walk to the slow paced rhythm of the song.  She began to mime anger through her contorted face and index finger pointing toward something in front of her.  Still with a backward jazz walk, she bent her knees lower.  The youth continued to toss and turn.  The music picked up and a man entered also from the left, also with a jazz walk, but this time forward, with more speed, and straight legs.  They mimed a fight.  The youth continued to toss and turn.  

The scene brought me back to my 5 and 6 year-old self in San Jose of my own parents fighting soon after we had moved there.  I wondered if that’s when my insomnia had begun.  If only we had stayed in Brazil.  The song progressed into a peak of quick, strong beats.  So did the fighting.  Then the song slowed, as did the fighting.  The parents shook hands and walked to the child, one parent on each side of his bed.  Each parent took one of the child’s hands and lifted him up to a sitting position.  Then they lifted him off the bed and took him into their arms and a full family embrace.  The song closed with the words Estás en casa.  You are at home.  

I was breathless.  The drama presentation had just confirmed and reinforced the epiphany.  Here, in South America, I was at home.  I fell onto my lap.  Into my journal a couple of years later, I recorded the moment as feeling “like I had entered a place of Harmony, as if everything, including me, was interlinked with everything and everyone.” 

A rocking, rhythmic whooping that celebrated each mother attending the service concluded the Mother’s Day Celebration, led by a youth musical team singing, clapping, and playing the drums and tambourines.  Orchids, Venezuela’s national flower, lined up the center aisle.  Two teens, a boy and a girl, stood at the front holding flowers.  Another young man, appearing to be about 20, led as master of the ceremony calling out the names of the mothers one by one, preceded by a special beat of about four measures, and then followed by another beat as long as necessary for the mother to dance through the center aisle to receive her flower.  The mothers were called in alphabetical order by first name, each starting, lovingly, with “Mama.”  Half way through this rocking celebration came my turn.  The familiar four measures of beats ran through while the mother who had just received her flower was returning to her seat.  “Mama Karina!” cried out the young MC, while casting his hand, palm up, toward me.  I was included.  None of these young people had met me, but someone must have cued them to the presence of every mother in the room, including me.  In San Jose, I had been so invisible, but here, where I thought I was a foreigner, I belonged.  I was en casa, at home.  A dancer myself, I hopped up to chassé to the drum beats and finish with a chaine turn at the end to accept my orchid, a lilac one, reminiscent of the aurora. 

            After the service, Samuel, smiling big, approached me.  He said the Spirit had prompted him to watch me during the drama presentation, that he saw my chest fall into my lap, and that the Spirit spoke to him that I had been granted a gift, a gift of the Spirit, a concept believed in charismatic churches, but not generally in those of our denomination.  His comment came as a surprise.  Were those “gifts of the Spirit” real? “Viste el cielo, no?”   You saw heaven, right?  Yes, sort of.  I thought, still confused.  But not in the way Samuel probably meant, and not at that moment, but the day before, in the sky, during the thunderstorm.  How do I explain this to him? 

            I tried to affirm what he witnessed was a powerful moment for me, and that I had felt like I had seen heaven, but the day before during the lightning storm when I saw colors, like a— I paused.  How do I translate “aurora borealis”?  I said I didn’t know the word in Spanish so I spoke it in English.  His eyes and face lit up as he exclaimed, “Aurora boreal!”  Beaming, he added that I had received a great gift.  I couldn’t make sense of Samuel’s expression, but perceived something ineffable taking place. 

I was silent for a moment and then shared with Samuel that I had a question for him.  A couple of days earlier, Daniel made himself absent for our next appointment, letting one of the others lead in his place.  Most of the team-members, both North American and Venezuelan, had also taken a break, me for my near fall and the others for sickness.  But Daniel didn’t look sick.  When he returned, I asked Daniel if he had been sick, but he assured me he had not been; all was well.  He was calm, pleasant, and returned to normal, except a little more distant from me.   Could it be, I asked Samuel, that I was Daniel’s “sickness”?  Samuel threw up his head and laughed.  “Siii!  He chuckled. Verdaaad!”  Yes, that’s right!  Still chuckling, he asked if Daniel was also a “sickness” for me.  Also chuckling, I had to admit that Daniel was indeed a “sickness” for me too.  Beneath the whirlwind of my memories and the paranormal, my attraction to Daniel had been somewhat buried, but his telepathic eyes of interest clicked my own awareness on that I felt the same way.  But my reply to Samuel was simple: I also love my husband.  “Bueno!”  Grinning, Samuel promised that he and the elders would be praying for me and supporting me right along with their support of Daniel. 

            Little did either Samuel or I realize at that moment just how much support I might need, and for more than just Daniel, and especially from Samuel himself, for no one in North America would understand what was about to come for me upon my return to the United States.  The Summer in the Twilight Zone was about to amp itself up, and like Mother Nature, hold two distinct states.  Beauty and terror.

Continue to Part 3: Remembering with Mom